The community technology preview (CTP) of Hadoop for Windows Azure is now available, by invitation only, and is described as "all Metro".

The new Hadoop on Azure service, which is now available as a community technology preview (CTP), is being described as ‘all Metro - that is a Metro UI with a Live Tile implementation.’ Metro is the design language that Microsoft first showed for Windows Phone 7, and that is now being touted as the way to develop for Windows 8 in preference to Silverlight and .NET.

The blog post announcing it from the SQL Server Team says that the Hadoop on Windows service lets you interact with a range of environments including Hadoop, Hive, Pig-Latin, Hadoop Javascript framework, Windows Azure DataMarket, and Excel.

The Hadoop service itself is hosted on Azure, so you just download a package that includes the Hive Add-in and Hive ODBC Driver. You can also make use of new JavaScript libraries to write MapReduce programs in JavaScript. These can then be run from web browsers.

On the BI side, you get the Hive Add-in for Excel that can be used to query and work with data from Hadoop within Excel. The Hive ODBC Driver integrates Hadoop with Microsoft BI tools such as PowerPivot and Powerview, again meaning business users can query and analyze unstructured data from Hadoop.

The video explains the grand idea:

The CTP is by invite only, so if you want to try it you need to fill in the Connect survey.

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